I do realize that Skype is trying to add a great number of people, do an IPO, pay for their funky new office, etc. And I get that they can't necessarily pay for all that purely on the revenue from the small percentage of people who pay for actual services.

But still... we've been ad-free for 7 years of Skype usage.

And I do realize that the vast majority of users are getting the Skype service for free and so having advertising in the client should be a small price to pay for what is still a free service. (Full disclosure: I am a paying Skype customer.) And I do realize that pretty much every other desktop client in the world has some form of in-client advertising.

But still... we've been ad-free for 7 years of Skype usage.

And yes, we should probably just suck it up and accept that we've had 7 great years of no advertising inside of Skype... and that this day was bound to come.

But still... (you get the idea)

R.I.P., Advertising-free Skype!

P.S. Oh, and Skype team... believe me when I say that I will NOT whine and complain if you never bring this "feature" over to the Mac :-)

So on Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, the attention of many of us at Enterprise Connect was not entirely on the speakers or presentations, but rather also on watching sites like the Engadget Live Blog of the iPad2 event. Analyst/blogger Dave Michels happened upon three of us in the press room who were watching the news... and naturally he had to take a picture (and naturally we had to ham it up a little bit)...

In about 45 minutes, Skype will be giving a keynote here at EnterpriseConnect in Orlando (1:30pm US Eastern) and will apparently be making a "big announcement" about Skype in the enterprise. They have been cagey about what the announcement is... but one contact I know well there says that I will "like it". :-)

We will see how accurate he is... I will naturally be tweeting out the keynote live at: